Am I dependent on caffeine or excessive sugar to function?

The experiences of practiced meditators, who describe similar phenomena, may offer a clue. At the peak mystical moment, they sense the boundaries of their selves dissolve and, as a result, feel no more separation between themselves and the world around them. They experience, as a meditator in one study put it, a sense of timelessness and infinity. It feels like I am part of everyone and everything in existence. Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Franciscan nun, described the feeling perfectly: I possessed God so fully that I was no longer in my previous customary state but was led to find a peace in which I was united with God and was content with everything. Cory Muscara has been there, too. Cory, originally from the South Shore of Long Island, entered college with the intention of going into finance. But by the time he graduated in 2012, he wanted to do something more with his life--and so he traveled to a monastery in Burma, where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk. During his six months there, Cory meditated for fourteen to twenty hours daily, slept on a thin mattress on a wooden plank, and ate two simple meals a day, one at 5:30 a. There was no talking, no music, and no reading--just an ascetic regimen meant to break down the walls of the self. It sounded pitiful. Almost defeated. I felt grateful. The events of the day had been so extraordinary that I fully expected that it was possible to will myself to die and to leave my physical body. I calmly walked into the room and lay on the mattress. Nothing happened. I closed my eyes. I waited for death to come. Still nothing. So, in an effort to physically express my willingness to die, I covered my torso with what was near the bed, a small towel.

When it happens, your sadness and your will of independency have crossed the boundary of your body and invaded the other one. Once this is done, the other reacts emotionally as he or she feels your emotions as his or her own. Above all, the other person feels to have the right to question you as your change (financial independency is a great change) will affect the relationship with you. Every change in a codependent relationship is a risk to lose contact with the person who is changing. Finally, a codependent judge will enter your head and tell you that you have no reason to feel sad, or that your sadness is wrong. If you feel sad, give up your sadness because it is uncomfortable in another person's head. This is an example of what could happen when we lose the boundaries due to a codependent relationship, we could add many others, but this is especially useful to start to see something hard to accept when we are codependents: within the codependent relationship, both sides can react aggressively if the other person wants to leave and both sides can be manipulative or can try to avoid separations. As codependents, we can be the ones who frustrate other's desires to be independent, or we can be the ones frustrated if we need some kind of independency. It means that as codependents we can be victims (if we live with a narcissist, we are clearly the victim), but we can also be abusers, if the dependent person could leave. When we relate to narcissists manipulators, we can be only the victim. Encourage each individual to build upon his or her own special knowledge and inner strengths. Promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration, and creative self-reliance. Confirm the greatest hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age. Empower the individual to choose to do that thing really, really well. Wangari Muta Maathai plants trees. In 1977, she planted nine trees in her backyard in Kenya and founded the Green Belt movement. She planted the trees to stop soil erosion and provide wood for cooking fires. She has been arrested, imprisoned, and beaten for her efforts, and she has also won the Nobel Peace Prize. Wangari has organized more than a hundred thousand women in Kenya and surrounding countries to plant thirty million trees, so far. One tree at a time, these women are planting for a brighter future for themselves, their descendants, and their country.

When Cory set off for the monastery, he was looking forward to an adventure. I was wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, he said, and excited about severing myself from everything that brought me comfort in my sheltered life. When he got to the monastery, situated on 100 acres of rolling hills, he found that his room, no bigger than a prison cell, was full of ants. This is exactly what I want, he thought. Twelve hours later, he was not so sure: he was crying in his bed, questioning his reasons for coming to Burma. The situation did not improve. Within days of practicing the strict meditation program, which began each morning at 3:30 a. The sheet of pain started at his neck and went down his back and around to his abdomen, which would cramp up if he breathed too deeply. His pain interfered with his meditation: he couldn't distance himself from his thoughts. All he thought about was how much his body hurt. Again, I closed my eyes. Then, I willed death to come. THE QUESTIONS After a moment of silence, I heard the infinitely loving and beautiful voice that had spoken earlier in the library. It seemed to be coming from within my body somehow. It said, Are you ready to give it all up? Now, there did not seem to be much left of a distinct personality called me. My answer was, Yes. I felt sure of it. A few moments of silence filled the space.

When we relate to any other person, the abuse can flow in both directions as a way to preserve an important relationship. That's why talking about codependent people is not really correct, we should talk about codependent relationships. The codependency is intrinsic in relations not in individuals. The lack of boundaries reduces the distance with others much closer. Who defends this vision usually says: If codependency is somehow inside of you and not in the space between you and the other, why don't you try to be codependent on a desert island. This statement opens a huge debate not suitable for this article but it's still a fundamental note to face the problem of codependency much better. Once accepting that, it's easier to accept that healing from codependency does not mean to modify our essence but to change our relationship style, and in the next articles we will see how to do it. Our Control Creates Toxic Relationships We control ourselves and others without giving importance to the negative consequences of difficult or deeply toxic relationships. When we are codependent, this represents the group of behaviors more than any others, can damage our psychological and physiological safety. When eighteen-year-old Tiffany Grant lost her life in a car accident at an intersection in downtown Baltimore, her mother simply could not go near the place, as it increased her feeling of pain and loss. But something unexpected changed that. The city erected a red-and-white street sign that read Tiffany Grant Way. The sign helped ease the mother's pain a little, and she was thankful. Talking about the 180 signs that have been placed on city streets over the past twenty years, a city spokesman explained, The signs are intended to honor special individuals, places, and events that have affected Baltimore's communities. This one honors the memory of a young woman who was a friend, an honor student, and a daughter. Sadly, in many parts of America, funding for art and music classes has been cut, leaving kids who express their voices without words few opportunities for self-discovery and development. Yet all over the country, people and organizations recognize the healing properties of creativity and the arts, and are doing something about it. In New York, an organization called Free Arts mentors kids through the experience of painting murals and making sculptures, fostering their self-discovery. A mentor and volunteer wrote to Free Arts, describing what the experience has meant to her:

Five days after his arrival, Cory decided he couldn't live like this for six months; But on the day he was scheduled to leave, Cory revisited the original reason for coming to the monastery--which was to understand suffering more deeply. He decided to stay and face suffering rather than to run away from the very thing he was seeking to know. During those long and painful days, Cory was practicing, or supposed to be practicing, mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is meant to inspire a state of heightened awareness. Rather than repeating a mantra, as in other forms of meditation, the practitioner focuses on everything that is happening to him and around him, like the rising and falling of his breath or the subtle sensations of his body as he moves. Mindfulness, as one of its most famous teachers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has put it, means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. Ultimately, the individual is supposed to realize that he can step away from his thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences and observe them neutrally, rather than allowing them to define him. In Buddhism, mindfulness meditation is a path toward enlightenment, or the realization that the self is an illusion. As the layers of the self are peeled away through meditation, all that is left is the individual's raw experience of the world as it really is--a reality defined by unity and interconnectedness rather than by the natterings of the ego. The voice spoke again. It asked, Will you give up Tepe? As if I were making a vow, I reverentially replied, Yes. Then It said, Will you give up . And it listed family members and people who were dear to me. Again, I lovingly and truthfully answered, Yes. After some time, It said, Will you give it all up? I pulled everything I could find that was left inside of me out and answered, Yes. I willingly gave up everything--my life, all identification of what had been me. I committed and gave it all up.